Saturday, 27 April 2013

It be seem an odd thing to you that I have linked the idea
of emotions to that of wargaming. After all, most wargamers are chaps (with a
few notable exceptions, of course, as the wargame blogosphere will show) and
chaps, of necessity, do not show emotion.

I could demonstrate this in a number of ways. For example,
Wellington responding along the lines of ‘By gad, so you have’ to a colleague’s
exclamation ‘By gad, I’ve lost my leg’. Or Stan, the handyman on Victoria
Wood’s ‘Dinner Ladies’ reporting that, after his mother had left his father in
1950-something ‘He didn’t cry until
1966, when Germany equalised’. On the whole, then, men are supposed, in western
culture at least, not to show much emotion.

This is perhaps especially true in England, where the still
upper lip is supposed to be the true aim of all true born Englishmen, and young
boys are encouraged to ‘be a brave soldier’ when confronted with a broken arm,
leg, train set or whatever.

This is all well and good, except that Kierkegaard teaches
us that it cannot, in fact, be true. He observes that decisions, ultimately,
have to be taken using emotions, which he describes as passions. The issue is
this: We can continue debating and trying to discern the outcomes of the
various choices before us for ever, if we choose. But, in normal life, we have
to make a choice, a decision, and see what happens.

This is, in fact, one of the criticisms laid at the door of
the ethical theory of utilitarianism, or consequentialism. The idea of
utilitarianism is that you weigh up all the possible outcomes, and choose the
one which maximises some measure of happiness or good for the most number of
people. Firstly, of course, it is impossible to perform this sort of
calculation in any way, shape or form. But secondly, we can keep analysing
until the end of time before we actually decide which is of no use to anyone if
we need to decide here and now whether the player was offside, or if we should
vote for this or that political party.

Fortunately, human nature has been endowed with a function
that allows it to make decisions and get on with living them out. We have
hunches, or intuitions, of whatever we want to call them, make decisions, and
get on with life, and the consequences of those decisions. We have to, or we
would never get out of bed in the morning.

So, how does this play out in wargame terms?

We can, of course, sit in our armchairs by the fire with a
pile of rules and army lists by our elbows, rationally contemplating which army
we will build next. We can draw up lists, scour the catalogues of toy soldier
makers to ensure that they produce figures with exactly the correct form of
scabbard for the year we have in mind, sigh that the number of gaiter buttons
is incorrect on all known figures, and write our orders (or ready them for
email).

At this point, we have to decide. Is this army the army we
want? Will it perform as we hope? Will we possess enough will power to paint it
and get it on the table? All of these questions, and more, have to be answered
in some way before we commit. And yet we do commit, quite easily. Not because
we have analysed all possible combinations of soldiers and all the foes they
are likely to meet, but because we feel that it is right to order. It will
work, we will paint them and do battle with them and even, perhaps, win.

Similarly, on the wargame table, we have to make decisions.
I have mentioned before that I do not really think that knowing the percentage
chances of winning a given combat between two groups of soldiers is
particularly useful, and this is why. A battle is much more complex than a
combat between two different groups of soldiers. We might win the combat, by
riding the skirmishers with our heavy cavalry, but that is not of much use if
our heavy cavalry was, in fact, required on the left wing to exploit a
momentary advantage, the neglect of which leads to our downfall.

The human mind, even in something as relatively simple as a
wargame, thus needs to do a lot more than just thinking about the rational
moves to be made. Firstly, we need to make some sort of decisions or, as I
implied above, we will never have a wargame at all. But secondly, we need to
assimilate so much information, so much about the content of a given situation
on the table (even in a relatively simple wargame, such as DBA) that
rationality cannot be the deciding factor in what we actually decide to do.

Now, this does not mean, as I hope I have said above, that
we are actively irrational in our generalship. What it does mean is that we
cannot afford, and in fact do not, analyse everything. Some situations are
non-analysable in a reasonable time anyway. But mainly, we just have to get on
with our decisions, backing our hunches, intuitions and judgements.

I believe that there is some recent work in psychology that
suggests that we make decisions even before we actually become conscious of
those decisions. I am not a psychologist, but I do suspect that the results
need a bit of caution. Nevertheless, it does suggest that our rational
decisions are not as rational as we might like to think, or, at least, that our
rational deductions are, in the main, only there to justify our emotional
response. Human decision making is a lot more complex that it appears.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that even to us stiff
upper lip types, our emotions or passions are the only way we finally get to
make decisions. Maybe, therefore, we can argue against those who wonder why grown-ups
are immature enough to play with toy soldiers by suggesting that it is a sign
of both intellectual and emotional maturity…

Excluding the sillier versions of
postmodernism which claim that things do not exist if we do not talk about them,
I think there might be a case to answer. Not that I am particularly happy with
that idea. As you may have gleaned from the posts here in the past, I have a
background in science, and science does not really do postmodern. A frequent
stance, after all, between scientists and postmodernists is that of distinct
hostility (see the Sokal Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).
Still, let me ponder my ponderings and see if a case can be made that I am, in
fact, a postmodern wargamer.

One of the main tenets of
postmodernism is a rejection of meta-narratives, by which is meant a rejection
of overarching explanations of events, people and things. Thus, postmodernity can
reject such ideas as ‘progress’, on the basis that progress is only progress for
some, for others it is exploitation. Similarly, hierarchical structures of
human society can be rejected as exploitative; things do not have to be as they
have always been, as used to be assumed in, say, the medieval period.

Whether this last point is
historically true is rather moot, or we would still be there, of course, but
that is not really the point here.

With respect to this blog, I
suspect that it does tend to reject overarching narratives of wargaming. As I
have mentioned several times before, I do not believe the notion that one set
of core rules can provide a reasonably accurate representation of warfare over
the last several thousand years, no matter how much chrome is applied in the
form of expansion packs, extra rules and army lists and so on. I do get
somewhat disheartened by the selling of large sets of very expensive rule sets
whose mechanisms basically refer back to one original idea in a given period.

So that, I suppose, is the first
tick in the postmodern box. I do not buy into the idea of an overarching rule
set, from which all other rule sets are derived, with just a bit of polishing.

A second point is that, more or
less as a consequence, I do not agree with this idea that a single model of an
event will capture the events, or even a reasonable subset of events. That is,
a single model or rule set will not capture all the nuances of a battle.

At some level, this is
astoundingly obvious. An army level rule set will not, cannot, capture the
events of a single person at, say, the Battle of Balaklava. Some individuals were
in the lancers charging up the valley, some in the infantry or the heavy
brigade, some making tea in the camp overlooking the whole debacle. A few were
generals. We might be able to capture the important events and influences on
the units, but not the trajectory of the individuals on the day.

To tackle the events in an individual’s
battle, we would need to narrow the focus to, say, a skirmish level game, or
even a role playing game. This, of course, would allow us to track the progress
of the individual, but we lose the bigger picture, at the unit or army level.

I also do not think that we can,
in principle, assume that many role playing game level activities going on will
give us the battle. An army unit is, in some senses, more than just a crowd of
people. It has training as a unit, esprit de corps, and whatever else is
drilled into it. It is not just a bunch of several hundred people hanging around
together. So even several hundred role players will not, I suspect, give us a
historical unit’s behaviour.

Even at a given level, I am
really not sure that a single model will yield the results that we need. Any
model surely has to take some sort of average of behaviour, and exclude the
extremes. A unit may have run at the first shot, but most units do not do this.
The average tends to blend out the extreme. So we have to choose our models to
pick out the things that we thinks are important, and the way we think they are
important.

Clearly, these decisions about
importance and the interactions of the important things will vary among models.
At a simple level, interactions between training, morale and tactics will
determine how we are imagining our soldiers will fight. Some may close in for
close action; others stand off and shoot at long range. This may not be due to
a single factor, but the ways even these three items can interact can, and
will, vary from model to model.

If postmodernism means that I do
not think that one single description of reality (or, in this case, a
historical event) will do, then again, I suppose I am probably, in that sense,
postmodern.

Furthermore, I have, in these
posts, occasionally questioned our sources of historical, and hence,
wargamer-ly information. I suspect that lurking somewhere in here is something
that could be accused of postmodernism – a scepticism about what people have
written and why. As it happens, I do not subscribe to postmodern theories of
deconstruction (which I think tend to the incoherent), but I do think that, as
wargamers, we have a tendency to pick out the bits about battles we like and
ignore the rest.

As a brief example, frequently
classical writers bemoan the poor state of the army, and explain how a new
general got them up, trained, fit and generally raring to go, and thus winning
the next campaign before the enemy (used to the old, lax, army) got out of bed.
This happens too often to be particularly true, I think; it is a literary trick
to explain a success, to lay it in the hands of the victor. We need to be more
careful with how we read, but we do not need to dismiss everything we do read.

So, counting up the issues
here, I seem to be about two-thirds postmodern.

Saturday, 13 April 2013

Now, you might think that I have finally flipped my lid,
and, of course, it is perfectly possible that I have, but let me try to
explain, unpack what on earth Hegel was talking about, and what it has to do with
this blog.

Minerva, as I am sure you are all aware, was the Roman
equivalent of the Greek Athena, the goddess of wisdom. She was also, as I am
sure you also know, the protector of Athens. Her symbol was an owl, and hence
the Athenian coinage, the obol, was also embossed with an owl. An interesting
reference to all this is, in fact, in the children’s TV series ‘Bagpuss’, where
there is an episode called ‘The Owls of Athens’, which, as a bonus, also
explains why nightingales sing and owls hoot. But I digress a little.

So, with “The Owl of Minerva” we have some sort of reference
to wisdom, of, in Hegel’s case, philosophy. Flying at twilight, however, is a
reference to the fact that we are usually philosophical in reflection, or, to
put it more colloquially, wise after the event. So wisdom and philosophy are
reflective, backward looking human intellectual undertakings.

This does not mean that philosophy is useless, however, but
it does mean that without something to reflect upon, philosophy will not
usefully happen. In my case, in an Anglo-American analytical philosophical
tradition, I cannot really engage in philosophy until I have something
empirical to try to understand. Anything else is dangerous speculative
metaphysics, which Hegel is often accused of, and is best left to those weird people
who want to undertake what is usually called (in the said Anglo-American
tradition) ‘Continental Philosophy’, often with a sneering curl of the lip.

Now, far be it from me to join in the sneering. After all,
as some of you might have worked out, I am something of a fan of Transcendental
Thomism, which certainly does not fall within the normal Anglo-American
tradition. Nevertheless, I think it is worth trying to unpick what Hegel’s
comment might mean for this blog, at least.

Obviously, without wargaming in general existing, there would
be nothing to reflect on and nothing to worry about ethically. Given that there
is something like wargaming, we can attempt, as I do here from time to time, to
reflect on what it might mean, and how, ethically, we might proceed about it. However,
the issue is, of course, that the Owl only flies at twilight, that is, the
pondering about it does not, itself, change the subject of the pondering.
Thinking about wargaming does not, itself, alter wargaming.

This is clearest, I think, with the recent bits about
ethics. As you might be aware, I have suggested that, ethically, we choose what
we wargame because we accept those representations as being part of ourselves,
of the narratives that we construct about ourselves and are prepared to tell
other people. I might, for example, have a penchant for wargaming the nastier
elements of the SS, but I may not wish to share that bit of myself, my
narrative with anyone else. My public narrative could be squeaky clean, but my
private one could be vicious. If you do not believe me, just have a quick look
at the press stories about how some very squeaky clean public reputations have
been found wanting recently.

As it happens, my private reputation, on the SS front, at
least, is as intact as my public one; I do not wargame World War Two, so the
question is irrelevant. But the ethical answer I have found to the question ‘What
shall we wargame’ does rather beg a preceding one: why does having a coherent narrative
matter?

There are some people, of course, who would argue that
having a coherent narrative of our lives does not matter. Some existential
philosophers (in the continental tradition) might well argue that it does not
matter, for example some of the work of Sartre suggests that coherence is not
an issue; we do not need to live our lives coherently. We could be vicious at
one point and virtuous a few minutes later. As long as we exist in the moment,
how we exist, compared to how we existed a moment ago, does not matter. The
only thing that is important is now.

This is, of course, a point of view, but it is not one that
I, at least, subscribe to. Many, if not most, people actually do seem to think
that having a coherence to one’s life is important, at some level. Thus I can
say that I would no more play the SS than I would fly to the moon unaided. It
simply does not fit with my view of myself as a human.

Obviously, people do play the SS, even, occasionally, the
nastier parts of it, and some players will play the baddies, and so on. The
question then arises as to why this should be. Clearly, in, say a WW2 battle,
someone has to play the Germans, or there is no battle. Similarly, in a role
playing game, someone has to play the bad guys for the player characters to try
to beat. How can these players assimilate these items to their narratives and
still be true to themselves?

I think that there are two responses here. Firstly, that
some players are quite willing to shave their narratives to include playing
baddies, on the basis that no-one was all bad. The German army in WW2 was not
stacked full of ideological Nazis, they might argue, and anyway, they had cool
uniforms and equipment. Well, maybe that is a good enough reason, but it will
not wash with me, I’m afraid. ‘Good’ weapons are not a sufficient reason in my
book to play the army, not when compared with the murder and mayhem it caused
in the world.

The second response, which might be a better one, is to
admit the evil caused by the army and not to justify playing it in terms of its
equipment, courage, organisation or anything else. This way needs to keep some
sort of emotional and intellectual distance from the activity of the army
historically, so the deeds of the original do not intersect with our narratives
of ourselves. In effect, we invent a ‘clean’ version of the original, and
wargame with that.

Of course, you could suggest that this is what we do with
any historical army. I doubt if any ECW wargamer seriously considers the New
Model Army as having committed war crimes. But, perhaps, with WW2 the issues
are a lot more pointed, as well as more recent.

Saturday, 6 April 2013

My guess as an answer to that
question is that a set of wargame rules is a fairly conventional book type
thing with an introduction, definitions, and some rules for battles and, maybe,
some suggestions for campaigns, or some army lists or something similar at the
back. Maybe there are some nice colour pictures of toy soldiers in the text,
and a few photographs which try to explain some of the finer points of the
rules, and so on.

I can think of few rule sets
which do not conform to this sort of structure. I suppose that the one sort
which do not are computerised rule sets, but they do not seem to be actually
that popular. At least, I’ve never used them and I think I have only seen computer
wargame rules at one show, and I cannot remember if they were on sale or used
in a demonstration game.

There may be a number of reasons
why rule sets are usually in a given form. The overwhelmingly like reason is
that most of us do not want a computer cluttering up the wargame table
alongside everything else. Certainly in the days before wafer thin lap tops,
tablets computers and Smart phones, most people did not want to wheel a great
big PC into the room just to calculate the results of a few dice rolls.

Speaking as someone who spends
most of his days sitting in front of a computer screen, I, personally, do not
wish to do so in pursuit of my hobby as well. Aside from the fact that
computers go out of date faster than you can say ‘Moore’s Law’ and the fact
that often, at the most critical juncture, they go wrong and refuse the
calculate the effects of the advance of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo. I might
work with them but I do not have to like them.

Be that as it may, I’m still not
sure that computer moderated rules are terribly popular. The point is, I think,
the computer moderation of the rules. I have reasons to suppose that placing
wargame rules on computers, so they can be read as, say, a PDF, might be
popular, but that is simply because you can then read the rules on, say, a
Kindle rather than on a paper page. The medium has not changed that much; a
book on a Kindle is, in all important respects, an analogue of a book. After
all, that is an important aspect of the marketing of e-book readers.

The result of this trend, that of placing
conventional rule books in computer formats, is that the full use of the
possibilities of computers are not exploited by format. By this I mean that,
for example, video or audio channels are not exploited and nor, in most cases,
are ideas of, for example, having an army list calculator built into the rule
set. A wargame rule set, conventionally, is a flat document which does not do
an awful lot. A wargame, however, is a dynamic thing acted out in some sort of
real time.

Now, I suspect that computer
moderated rule sets are not terribly popular because we like to ‘see the
workings’, as it were. If I am the general of a wargame army, I want to roll
the dice and see the result, not tap a few numbers into the machine and get a
result. I want to feel personally responsible for rolling that 6, or feel the
terrible sinking feeling of the double one that sends my hussars scurrying the
wrong way across the table.

So a computer moderated wargame
rule set probably pushes the boundary of what we want from rule sets a little
bit too far. We do not want to be confronted by a completely black box which
just issues inscrutable results. Part of the reason for wargaming, I suspect,
is a desire to see the logic behind outcomes, even if that logic is moderated
by random dice rolls. After all, the randomness more or less balances itself
out within a game or two, if not within a given game itself.

The fact is, the medium does have
a role to play in determining the message. A book gives a way of receiving the
message: you have such and such factors, you have this terrain effect, you have
a dice roll and you look up the results of this table. The result is explicit
and intelligible. This is not the case in a computer moderated rule set.
Inscrutability is not what we are after, even if it can be argued that it is
more accurate (whatever that might mean).

Wargaming, of course, does use
computers extensively, but not for the actual game itself. You, gentle reader,
are an example of this, reading a wargame related blog. But the rules are not
really a part of this. One answer might be that wargamers are inherently
conservative; another might be that I am completely out of touch with wargaming
reality, but I suspect the answer is much more widely known than that. If we use computer wargame rules, we change
the nature of what we are doing.

It is well known that, for
example, a text of a story and a video of the same story give different
responses in the viewer, even if the events in each are the same. The medium in
which the story is delivered is a part of the story. While, of course, it is an
exaggeration to declare that the medium is the message, there is a real effect.
If we computerise our rules, we are doing something different from having the
rule book to hand; it is not a totally different sort of event, but it is, to
paraphrase Star Trek, ‘wargaming Jim, but not as we know it.’

I am probably writing from
outside left field here, and do not think I have been very clear, but I would
be interested to know: would you use computer moderated rules?